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"Mac OS X can't repair the disk . . ." about THREE drives at once!?

I got the message "Mac OS X can't repair the disk . . ." not about just one drive, but about THREE drives -- a FW800 6TB CalDigit (RAID1), a 6TB LaCie 2 Big (RAID1), and a 1TB Lacie that I was using for Time Machine. A genius at the local Apple store told me he'd never seen this and that from his research it appeared to be unprecdented. What gives? I'm on a early 2011 MacBook Pro 17" with 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB 1333 MHz DDR3, AMD Radeon HD 6750N 1024 MB, running OS X 10.8.4.


I should back up and say that last night, I unmounted each of the drives, watched the drive icons disappear from the desktop and unplugged their connectors (FW800, thunderbolt, and USB, respectively). This morning, I plugged the drives back in and got the message above along with an arresting red stop sign symbold wiht excamation point in the middle.


I should add that the messages for each drive went on to say, "You can still open or copy files on the disk, but you can't save changes to files on the disk. Back up the disk and reformat it as soon as possible."


So now I am engaged in the very time consuming process of transferring everything off of each drive, one at a time onto backup drives. Once that's done I plan to erase each of the original drives with zeros and reformat them. But I'm very worried this might happen again.


A few months ago, the exact same thing happened with one drive (the 6TB Cal Digit), and (perhaps significantly) it happened after I had unplugged the firewire accidentally. I transferred everything on it to an empty drive, reformatted it, and it's been running fine. I had assumed it was just some fleeting problem with that drive. But now that THREE drives did this at the same time, I'm wondering if something could be wrong with my Mac, with OS X, with my karma, . . . Who knows? Any ideas?


Thanks!

Harry

MacBook Pro (17-inch Early 2011), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4), 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB 1333 MHz

Posted on Sep 12, 2013 6:01 PM

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3 replies

Sep 13, 2013 4:55 AM in response to nbar

Nbar, thanks! I did not know about the "known bug in ML with RAID configurations involving drives 2.2 TB or larger." I've been using these two drives for a couple of years and haven't had any trouble until now. Is that 2.2TB for the full RAID or each partition -- i.e., would I be safter with a 4TB drive set up as RAID1? Any other info you have on this bug would be helpful.


I don't think the TM drive was encrypted, but I'm really not sure. Just a couple of weeks ago I got a message from a third-party program called Drive Genius that my Macintosh HD (i.e., the main internal HD of my MacBook Pro) had 3 bad blocks and that it should be backed up, erased with zeros, and restored from the backup. So (after visiting the Apple store where they did not see any bad blocks but admitted they might be missing something that Drive Genius was detecting), I confirmed that my TM backup was recent, erased my internal drive with zeros, and restored from the TM drive. That's a long answer, but the point is I don't recall having to enter any special password to restore from the TM drive -- which I imagine I would have to do if it were encrypted, right?


The FAR BIGGER issue this morning is that my computer is NOT STARTING AT ALL. Last night, I went to bed while the 6TB Cal Digit RAID1 drive was about 6 hours into an 8-hour transfer all of its contents onto a new LaCie 3TB thunderbolt drive that I purchased yesterday. When I woke up, I checked both drives, and it seemed like the transfer had gone fine. But I thought it might be a good idea to unmount both drives, shut the computer competely down, and restart. If there had been somehting going wrong in the unmounting process, then, I thought, perhaps when I restarted I'd get a message about the new LaCie drive saying "Mac OS X can't repair the disk . . ."


After I clicked "Shut Down" though, I got a message I'd never seen before. It said something to the effect that if I shut down now other users logged in might lose any unsaved changes. I do have a "Guest" account, which I switched over to, saw that iPhoto was open, shut iPhoto, and swtiched back to my main user account. But when I tried to shut down, I got the same message. I screen captured the message, unmounted the two drives, and shut down the machine. When I restarted, I figured it couldn't hurt to reset the P-RAM so when I turned the computer back on, after the first chime, I held down Apple-Option-P-R and let it chime two more times. After which it began to start -- the Apple symbol and the spinning wheel appeared for 10-15 seconds -- and then the screen went black and the machine shut off. I tired starting a few more times but with no luck. I am, of course, headed back to the Apple store today, but do you have any thoughts?


Thanks!
Harry

"Mac OS X can't repair the disk . . ." about THREE drives at once!?

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